Shopify starts every year by nuking all their meetings. At Yext, our CEO would barge into meetings he didn’t like and tell everyone to leave. Here’s why we all need to look at meetings this ruthlessly. Most people want to focus on their craft. Engineers want to code. Sellers want to sell. Designers want to live in Figma. When used right, meetings can be incredibly powerful for alignment, vision-setting, and cutting through confusion. But too often, meetings become the default hammer for every nail. Problem? “Let’s schedule a meeting.” Confusion? “Quick sync?” This reflex is killing productivity. The truth is, there are countless ways to drive alignment without defaulting to meetings. Write a doc, post clearly in Slack, record a Loom, or (though I hate them) even make a slide deck. Recently, I’ve found the best thing to do is just build the thing. Prototyping and getting feedback beats discussing what you might build almost every time. At Windmill, we treat meetings as one tool in the toolkit, not the only one. We track our meeting time religiously—total hours in internal meetings, hours per person, and how it trends as we scale. This data keeps us honest. We avoid standing meetings where possible, though we’re not dogmatic about it. When our team recently asked for more frequent all-hands, we listened. The key is staying flexible while being intentional. The problem isn’t meetings themselves. It’s how easy it is to create recurring ones. One click in Calendar, and suddenly you’ve committed hours of everyone’s time every week forever. The interface makes it too simple, and the damage compounds quickly. Every company needs to find what works for them. But whatever your approach, be deliberate about it. Because the natural entropy of organizations is toward more meetings, not fewer.
Windmill
10mo
Be deliberate 👏
Nick DiMauro
10mo
Love this. I too often see corporate teams fall victim to meeting overload. Pre meetings for the meeting. It turns into insecurities. Gut decisions become I need reassurance from a colleague decision. Builders need to build. Sellers need to sell.
Elena Haskins 🔍
10mo
Well, the problem isn’t having meetings It’s having bad ones with no clarity or outcomes Some of the best product breakthroughs I’ve seen came from a messy, real-time debate where people could read the room, challenge assumptions, and pivot in minutes not weeks of async back-and-forth
This is one of the most grounded and productive takes I’ve seen on meetings in a while—especially the insight that meetings are just one tool, not the default tool. Love the mention of using prototypes as a communication mechanism. We’ve seen the same thing at Marketplace Valet—nothing aligns faster than something tangible to react to. In fact, for a lot of our ecommerce clients, we often skip the slide decks and just build the first iteration of a marketplace listing or ops flow as a starting point. Instant clarity.